To many girls, sex with adults just part of life

Sha'Dawn Young is not a lawyer. She is not a certified expert on teenage sex. She's not an R. Kelly protester or a groupie.

Precisely because she had no agenda, I found her opinions on sex, law and Chicago's infamous R&B singer especially insightful when I met her Thursday outside the Cook County Criminal Courts Building.

"I understand the statutory rape law," said Young, who was leaning on the gray metal barricades of a media holding pen, chatting with three idle cameramen. Rhinestones glittered on the back pocket of her blue jeans.

"But it happens every day. When I was 15, I was having sex with a 25-year-old man. Why's R. Kelly's crime magnified?"

She quickly added, "If he even did it."

Inside, up on the fifth floor, R. Kelly was on trial, accused of videotaping himself having sex with a girl of 13 or 14. He says that's not him on the tape. The girl says that's not her.

But if he did do it, Young would understand. It's a crime with ample context.

"Some teenage girls out here put themselves in adult situations," she said. "They do it for the thrill of the ride. Just take a poll of teenage girls. Being with an older man is something teenage girls brag about: 'He chose me.'"

Young looked at Melanie Ijaoba. They'd met that morning on the bus to the courthouse.

"When you were 15," Young asked, "how many older men came at you?"

"Lots."

"Did you have sex with them?"

"No," Ijaoba said. "Because God said no."

Young laughed. "I went to a Catholic school and God said no."

What she learned at school couldn't counter what she saw at home, which included a grandmother who started having children at age 12.

Both women said there are two kinds of older men who hit on underage girls. One is "Chester Molester."

"He's the one the girls don't want to be around," Young said, "who doesn't have the cool clothes. For girls to want you, you have to have the cute car with the rims."

"The cell phone and money in the pocket," Ijaoba said.

"You buy the girl a pair of gym shoes," Young said.

"A pair of jeans," Ijaoba said.

Young is 33 now, but remembers how her mind worked at 15: "It was, like, he's the adult. He's doing something wrong. It wasn't a risk to me."

She was pregnant at 16, though in her family that was no crime. In the South, she said, where her mother and grandmother grew up, girls often got pregnant even younger, the difference being that girls there brought the man home to their parents; marriage was enforced.

"A lot of time now there is no father to bring the young man home to," she said. "More than likely, the young woman is looking for something she's missing at home."

I liked Young. She was frank, friendly.

And she was undoubtedly correct that what R. Kelly is accused of doing on that videotape -- whether or not he did it -- isn't all that different from what goes on in many parts of Chicago.

Girls, and not only poor ones, are growing up in a world where it makes sense to them to trade their bodies for a pair of jeans or gym shoes.

But just because it's common doesn't make it right. Even Young knows that now. "Now I don't think people should have sex until right before they're married. But I couldn't know it before I knew it."

She glanced at her cell phone clock. She had to go.

Her boyfriend was inside at a drug hearing.

As she wheeled through the courthouse door, I thought how the thing R. Kelly is accused of doing runs so much deeper than the act of a single celebrity.